The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

"Sam Kean brings the periodic table to life with the stories you didn’t hear in high school chemistry but will wish you did. Kean explains why tin screams when you bend it and what that has to do with Robert Scott’s disastrous trip to the South Pole (spoiler, it’s a phase change, like the melting of ice) and how cesium is used as an atomic clock. Every page is an adventure, showcasing the breadth of properties and behaviors of the elements. I’ve been a chemist for forty years and this book really captures what I love about chemistry – both its surprises and its predictability. Along the way, Kean clues you in to the mysteries of the periodic table, where it came from and how it is organized. As to the title, if you make a spoon from pure gallium, it looks and feels much like a stainless steel spoon, but if you use it to stir your tea, it will seem to vanish before your eyes. It is literally melting, gallium’s melting point is only 86°F (30°C) and if you pour out the tea you’ll find a pool of silvery liquid gallium at the bottom. There’s a cool video of it online! Sam Kean uses the story of the disappearing spoon to launch the story of the bitter clash between Dmitri Mendeleev, who is credited with developing the periodic table, and Paul Lacoq de Boisbaudran, who discovered gallium."

"Noelle: One of the things I really liked about this book is it uses a map metaphor for the periodic table and how you understand its structure, how different elements are connected, but also with a focus on how they’re connected to society. Money, politics, history, poison, crimes—all of those themes come up. Henrik: Of the books we picked, this is the oldest one, it came out in 2010. It is a great introduction to the history of the periodic table. The author, Sam Kean, uses a fair number of terms like atoms and molecules and protons and electrons, so if you have some prior understanding of basic chemistry, it makes it a little bit easier to read the book, but I would say even if you don’t have that background, but you are interested in these kinds of issues, it’s a very readable book. There are two other books that we picked that are a little bit more on the academic side, but The Disappearing Spoon is intentionally written as a general audience book, and I think it does a good job of achieving that goal. Noelle: One of the things the book does is humanize the process of science. It highlights the personalities of the scientists who discovered some of these elements and did some of the fundamental research, and how social connections among scientists resulted in some of the early discoveries and scientific advances related to the periodic table. Henrik: One of the things that Sam Kean does early in the book is that he calls the periodic table “one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind”. I think he’s right. A lot of people may not think about it, but how scientists figured out that periodic table, where the elements are listed, and how they are connected to each other, is essential to the lives that we live today. We would not have the kind of products that we have if researchers had not figured out these relationships. But if I were to highlight one specific story, it’s about several of the new elements. He mentions a small place in Sweden, Ytterby, which he refers to as “the Galapagos Islands of the periodic table”. It’s this very, very small place in Sweden where they have discovered more elements than in any other place in the world or by any other person. Now, as a small caveat, I am Swedish, so there’s some national pride involved in this. But it’s still a fascinating story. It also directly connects The Disappearing Spoon with Julie Klinger’s book on rare earth metals, Rare Earth Frontiers ."

"Kean reviews all of the elements of the periodic table and there’s a story associated with every element. He talks a lot about what makes things elements, what distinguishes one element from another and why those differences are important. I think he did a good job of letting people appreciate how big a difference a single proton can make in terms of the chemistry of an element. This is relevant to radioactivity too. An imbalance of protons and neutrons is what causes radioactivity, and you have different radioactive elements that are composed of different combinations of protons and neutrons. Each of these radioactive elements has its own story, whether it’s radium or strontium or caesium. I appreciated how Kean described that, and I tried to use a similar approach. I do like the story of radium. The short version is that in the 1920s radium was mixed with fluorescent paint and put on watch dials so that they would glow in the dark. The unfortunate women who did the painting would often point the brushes in the corner of their mouths to make them sharp enough, because it was very detailed work. They ended up ingesting a lot of radium. The unfortunate thing about it was that radium’s chemistry is very much like calcium, and calcium, we know, accumulates in bone. People had known that for decades. There were predictions that radium would also go to the bone, but nobody acknowledged the similarity in chemistry between these two things. And unfortunately radium did go into these women’s bones, they suffered all types of bone problems, including bone cancers. All of that could have been predicted by current knowledge of the chemistry of those elements, even without specific studies on radium. Strontium is in the same chemical family, we call them bone seekers. So when strontium was released after the atomic bomb blasts, scientists went back to the lesson of the radium dial painters. They were able to correctly predict what effects strontium would have on the body, based on knowledge of the chemistry of calcium. That’s because all of the elements in the periodic table appear in columns. Everything in the same column has similar chemistry. So even as new elements were being discovered, you could predict their chemistries because you knew what column they would fall into. Virtually all elements existed at the time of the supernova that created the solar system. Some of them were so unstable that they decayed away very rapidly and no longer exist. But they can be artificially produced. So after scientists exhausted all the common elements and even all the rare elements, they started producing new elements by bombarding existing elements with subatomic particles: protons and neutrons. One of the newer ones was named Roentgenium after Wilhelm Roentgen, who first discovered X-rays. In fact, I believe that another new element was announced just a few months ago. I don’t know what the limit to this is, but you take the elements you have and bombard them and look for these rare things. “Virtually all elements existed at the time of the supernova that created the solar system” These elements frequently have short half-lives, that’s what makes them rare. Things with very long half-lives, we find in the earth as common elements. For example, radium is constantly being produced by its parent, uranium, and it hangs around for well over 2000 years. But some elements have no immediate radioactive parent or have very short half-lives, so they’re gone."